AMD's Open Source Linux Driver Trounces NVIDIA's 147
An anonymous reader writes "In a 15-way graphics card comparison on Linux of both the open and closed-source drivers, it was found that the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver is much faster than the open-source NVIDIA driver on Ubuntu 13.04. The open-source NVIDIA driver is developed entirely by the community via reverse-engineering, but for Linux desktop users, is this enough? The big issue for the open-source 'Nouveau' driver is that it doesn't yet fully support re-clocking the graphics processor so that the hardware can actually run at its rated speeds. With the closed-source AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce results, the drivers were substantially faster than their respective open-source driver. Between NVIDIA and AMD on Linux, the NVIDIA closed-source driver was generally doing better than AMD Catalyst."
Nice heading (Score:5, Informative)
NVIDIA doesn't have an open source graphics driver... Nice misleading title there, timmy.
Re:So the OSS community sucks at writing drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Not entirely.
AMD's main drivers are proprietary, but they have open specs making it much easier for the community to write open source drivers, and they also assist the community in making those drivers.
NVIDIA neither opens their specs or assists in the development of the open source drivers.
That the open source AMD drivers would trounce the open source NVIDIA drivers is about as surprising as the Daily Mail finding something causes cancer.
Re:Nice heading (Score:5, Informative)
A rare Dinosaurs reference. Wow. Very nice.
Re:Nice heading (Score:5, Informative)
For those unfortunate to not get the joke: Ask Mr. Lizard [youtube.com]
Re:Too little Too late (Score:3, Informative)
The open source drivers support the older cards. ATI's plan is to dump support for legacy cards on to the community driver when it's too much of a pain in thte ass to keep the code going in their closed driver.